“Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.

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Yevgeny Zamyatin 34

Russian author 1884–1937

Roy Littlesun (1934)

“Computer science is an empirical discipline. […] Each new machine that is built is an experiment. Actually constructing the machine poses a question to nature; and we listen for the answer by observing the machine in operation and analyzing it by all analytical and measurement means available. Each new program that is built is an experiment. It poses a question to nature, and its behavior offers clues to an answer.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 114.

“We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?”

George Lakoff (1941) American linguist

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987)

“We used to think that schools built brains. Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use.”

Gordon Neufeld (1947) Canadian psychologist

Source: Neurochild Community

“This rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words
With better appetite.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.”

Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952) English neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize recipient

As quoted in the article The Human Brain — Three Pounds of Mystery, in 'The Watchtower' magazine (15 July 1978)

“Who's the Knight-Mayor?" I cried. Instead
Of answering my question,
"Well, if you don't know THAT," he said,
"Either you never go to bed,
Or you've a grand digestion!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Canto 5, "Byckerment"
Phantasmagoria (1869)

“One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).

“If, in order to obtain a correct and complete answer to a given question, all other things being equal, one construction requires a shorter observation time than another construction, we can say that it is more efficient for this question.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 139: Bertin’s definition of efficiency as cited in: Naomi B. Robbins (2009) Creating More Effective Graphs http://www.ssc.ca/ottawa/documents/SSO2009FallRobbins.pdf

“Man is neither carnivorous nor herbivorous. He has neither the teeth of the cud-chewers, nor their four stomachs, nor their intestines. If we consider these organs in man, we must conclude him to be by nature and origin frugivorous, as is the ape.”

Jean Pierre Flourens (1794–1867)

Quoted in The Perfect Way in Diet by Anna Kingsford (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1881), p. 14 https://archive.org/stream/perfectwayindie00kinggoog#page/n36.

“Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.”

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